Enter Jane
by HanneBelle
Summary: "The two women left together, and when Lisbon pushed the door open for the girl, allowing her to step out into the yellow light of the lanterns before her, she could feel something beginning to nag at the back of her head." Re-structured, that's why all is new...
1. A Cup of Coffee

Welcome to my first ever published fanfic! I've done some restructuring, in case anyone was wondering, which is why I'm posting everything again...

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

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><p>A Cup of Coffee<p>

„Well, there was this guy who came to talk to Leslie, about half an hour before she left. I'd never seen him before, so that was a bit weird."

"It was weird that a guy would try and chat your colleague up?", asked Cho without missing a beat.

The girl currently under his scrutinizing gaze flashed him a bright smile, unperturbed.

"No. The weird thing was that she actually stopped rinsing the cups and talked to him. Leslie never does that. She likes to play by the rules too much. She wouldn't even talk to me if I came in during her shift and wanted to have a chat."

Lisbon had taken a seat at the bar, where she sat now, contentedly sipping the direly needed cup of black coffee the girl, who was waitressing in the same coffee shop as their latest victim, had offered her immediately after she and Cho had come in. She must have noticed how tired the female agent looked, Lisbon thought, half-amused at the thought. Well, she wasn't complaining, and since Cho had also been offered a beverage, although he had declined it, Lisbon didn't feel like she was showing a weakness here – and since her consultant was not around to pick up on it anyway she didn't mind at all.

A secret smile pulled up the corner of her mouth as she noticed how Emma continued to wipe the table while she talked; she had done that since they had come in, immediately agreeing to talk to the agents about Leslie Harrold, their latest victim, but subtly slipping back into her work routine during the interview.

She actually had Cho, who didn't seem bothered, following her around the café, taking notes and asking questions while the girl collected dirty cups, wiped wooden surfaces and finally started brushing the floor.

Now she lifted her eyes to Lisbon's colleague's face. "I figured he might be her brother", she said slowly, as if a bit unsure of herself.

"What makes you say that?", Cho inquired immediately.

"Well", the girl said, ducking in order to be able to reach the floor underneath the furthest chair with her broom, "as I said, she never stops to chat when she is working; we're all a bit weird that way. I've seen her make her boyfriend wait till her shift was over before she'd allow him to really talk to her. But that guy came in, made a beeline for her, struck up a conversation – and she just let him. I don't know what they were talking about, I was over there" - she added, pointing to the other end of the bar where the cash register sat on the wooden counter – "trying to sell muffins to a really annoying customer, so I was rather occupied. Also, it didn't look like he was hitting on her, not even like he found her very attractive. Or she him," she added as an afterthought.

"How could you tell when you were so busy?" Cho asked, watching her with his usual close attention.

The girl gave him another smile, almost indulgent this time. "It's about the easiest thing in the world, telling if a guy is interested in a girl that way." She nodded at Lisbon and her smile turned almost intimate, as if they were sharing a secret.

That felt oddly familiar to the agent, although she couldn't quite say what made it so.

"Only takes one look. Anyway, he wasn't, so I figured, it can't be that she's flattered by the attention - she has to know him well, and he's got to be really important to her. Also, she'd told me some things about a brother who likes to get in trouble, so I thought he might need help or something."

Cho and the girl had arrived back at the counter now, and she was stowing away her cleaning utensils. Cho was standing next to Lisbon again, who emptied her cup of coffee with one long sip, and handed it to the girl on the other side of the wooden barrier.

"Thanks for the coffee", she said. The girl just nodded, putting the cup in the dish washer.

It was late, and the coffee shop had closed half an hour ago, so the only light still burning was the one over their heads. Lisbon looked at her partner while the girl went to put her uniform away. Cho seemed content with what they had gotten from the waitress so far, so they'd head back to the office now; it was too late to continue their work out here anyways.

"Why don't you go ahead and get the car?", Lisbon suggested, eager to leave. "I'll be out in a minute."

The girl came back, pulling her blond hair out of the ponytail she'd had it in before; it was surprisingly long, but because of her curls Lisbon hadn't noticed that before. She walked up to the counter, and Lisbon could see her checking if she had done everything that was necessary for the night; frowning, the waitress added a few coins to a small pile next to the coffee maker.

When she raised her eyes again, the older woman could see that she, too, looked rather tired.

"Why have you been asking me all these questions about Leslie?", the girl asked, and suddenly she seemed a lot younger than before, making Lisbon wonder about her age. She regretted not having paid much attention to the interview, trusting Cho to handle things, because now she missed the facts. Hell, she hadn't even bothered to make sure she caught the name!

The waitress had come around the bar and stood in front of the agent, looking at her intently; standing slightly taller than the dark-haired woman, her green eyes were prominent in her tired face, making her look even younger.

"Something's happened to her, hasn't it?", she said quietly, and Lisbon could her fear in her voice.

"I'm afraid so", she answered, trying to make her voice gentle. "She was found dead a couple of hours ago. We're investigating murder."

Her hand covering her mouth in shock, the girl who had, as far as Lisbon had seen, not shown any sign of unease while being interviewed by stone-faced Cho, sat heavily on the leather-covered stool behind her.

"Oh, no!", she whispered, tears springing to her eyes. "Why? How? When?"

Lisbon heaved a heavy sigh. She hated having to deal with emotional reactions from friends and family when it was this late in a day.

"I'm sorry, we don't have much yet. Were you close friends?", Teresa asked, sure that Cho had already covered that.

The waitress gave a funny tilt of her head, lifted her shoulders uncertainly, but, taking a deep breath, nodded her affirmation. "For your purposes, I guess you could say that."

"Then I'm going to have to ask you to come in tomorrow, please. It's too late today, you should get some sleep and calm down a little.", Lisbon told her, acting on her gut-feeling that this girl might know more about what had been going on in Leslie's life than Leslie would have told her.

"I can only come in the morning, though", the blond waitress said slowly. "I'm working the afternoon."

"That's no problem", the agent said, as friendly as she could. "Just go home now, and whatever time after 9 suits you is fine. Just ask for Agent Lisbon when you're there. Maybe your parents can drop you at the office before they go to work or something?"

The girl gave Lisbon one of her overly bright smiles and nodded.

"Or something", she agreed, the smile wiping any trace of fatigue or sadness from her face as long as it lasted. They were back in full force as soon as the corners of her mouth sunk again, though.

The two women left together, and when Lisbon pushed the door open for the girl, allowing her to step out into the yellow light of the lanterns before her, she could feel something beginning to nag at the back of her head.

She knew that kind of smile from somewhere, she just couldn't place it. The waitress turned the keys, then bid her good-bye and walked swiftly off down the road.

Cho had brought the car around and was parked in front of the coffee shop; Lisbon was frowning slightly when she opened the door on the passenger's side and climbed on her seat.

Cho looked at her impassively for a moment, then he started the car.

"She's got a strange name, that one", he informed her after they'd left the town centre and the night was creeping closer to the Jeep's windows as the dark countryside flew past them.

Lisbon, who had been trying to get rid of the nagging feeling and failing despite her best efforts, threw him a glance out of the corner of her eye. He looked about as puzzled as he ever looked, making her suspect that she wasn't the only one whose head was behaving weirdly.

"Is that so?" she asked, and trying to pretend she had paid some attention, she added, "Wasn't it something completely ordinary?"

"It's Emma", Cho went on, ignoring her question, and Lisbon felt that he knew perfectly well that she had no idea whatsoever. "Emma Jane."

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><p>thank you for reading :)<p> 


	2. Mind Tricks

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

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><p>Mind Tricks<p>

When Lisbon arrived to work shortly after nine the following morning, she was inwardly berating herself for being so edgy.

So they'd come across a girl who had the same surname as her consultant, big deal. There had to be more Janes in the country than the one she had running around her workplace.

If she was honest with herself, her edginess had a good deal to do with the nagging in her head, which hadn't stopped, and even if Cho hadn't shared his piece of information with her, she still would have felt slightly out of it.

Lisbon went straight to her office, calling a good morning to her team while she was passing by. She could see a tousle of blond hair sticking over the couches leathery armrest, telling her that her consultant was here.

As soon as she walked into her office, she could see that the phone on her desk was blinking; Teresa made her way across the room to where it stood, and checked her messages.

It was from reception downstairs, telling her that Jane was here, which made her smile despite her nerves.

Lisbon checked her watch. It was ten past nine; the girl had to have been there more or less precisely at nine.

She made a quick call downstairs, and then left her office again.

"I'll be talking to the victim's friend for a while", she informed her team, who gave small signs of having heard her without looking around, save Cho, who lifted his head and looked at her inquiringly.

She nodded slightly, letting him know that it was "their" girl, and tried to tell him with her eyes only to keep the others, especially Jane, away from the interrogation room.

"It doesn't look like anything hot, so keep looking, all of you!", she added for the room at large. Jane lifted a lazy hand and waved at her without looking around to show he'd heard.

Lisbon rolled her eyes and left the bullpen.

Sitting across from Emma, Lisbon took a deep breath and tried to get her weird thoughts out of her head to concentrate on the interview.

"It says here that your name is Emma Jane", Lisbon said, looking for a way to ease into this. Emma gave a tight nod, looking down on the surface of the table between them. Sensing some unease from the girl, Lisbon smiled and leaned forward.

"This is just routine, you know. I need to confirm your data before we start talking about Leslie."

The girl lifted her eyes from the spot on the table she had been so intent on and fixed them on Lisbon, giving her the impression that she suspected some of the things that were going on in her head. But when Emma answered, her voice carried no trace of any of these feelings.

She sounded a bit tired, which was understandable, and she wasn't as much at her ease as she had been in the coffee shop, but Lisbon supposed that these things weren't surprising: she hadn't known what had happened, and they had been in a place she knew well.

"Yeah, that's my name", Emma affirmed.

"Ok", Lisbon nodded, feeling slightly stupid. "Date of birth is…" but she didn't get to read the numbers out loud, because the girl interrupted her.

"If you're going to go through all these things, I can just give you my I.D., and you can cross-reference it", she stated, and now Lisbon felt sure she was picking up on some uneasiness on Emma's part.

She was already pushing her I.D. across the table, making the agent realize she had probably not let go of it since arriving.

"That way you'll be faster", the girl mumbled, obviously conscious that this wasn't something people normally did.

Lisbon took the document and quickly checked the facts; she didn't expect them to be out of order, and she wasn't surprised.

"You sleep alright tonight?" she attempted to set the girl at ease with some small talk, noting that it was barely 20 years old.

Emma nodded again, smiling this time. "Yeah, thanks. No bad dreams or anything."

"You were here really early", Lisbon remarked, "Your parents start work with the sun?" Having finished checking the data, she pushed the I.D. back across the table. Emma took it and slid into the pocket of her jacket, not smiling any more.

"I came with the bus", she answered, at the same time answering and avoiding Lisbon's question.

Deciding to get on with the interview, the agent opened the file that held both the information they had on Leslie and on Emma.

"You said you were friends with Leslie yesterday, but somehow you didn't seem convinced yourself", the agent started, noting how Emma seemed to relax a bit, now that the conversation had turned away from her.

"Well", she began, her voice gaining some of the liveliness it had held the day before, "we haven't known each other long. I've only worked in that place for a month or so-"

"Six weeks, it says here", interrupted Lisbon, watching Emma closely. She was surprised again by how readily the girl divulged certain facts about herself, and got so uncomfortable about others.

"Yeah, sounds about right", she agreed now, without a trace of uneasiness. "We didn't know each other before. I only came to town in the beginning of the summer, really", Emma explained, "for college. I got that job to make some money before I start, and Leslie had already been working there."

"You seemed to know her pretty well, though", Lisbon stated, surprised.

Emma looked slightly embarrassed. "People like to tell me things", she said, quietly. "I'm a good listener. Also, I was new in town, and I think Leslie decided that she could help me settle in. She invited me to her parent's place a couple of times, and had me meet her friends and everything." The girl stopped for a moment. "I guess she figured I owed her, so she started treating me like her confidential friend. She knew I wouldn't tell on her, whatever she told me, and I didn't know people anyways, so I was as safe as it gets, you know?"

Lisbon nodded, knowing exactly what Emma was getting at.

They passed half an hour going over both what the girl had told Cho the night before, and talking more about what she'd heard from Leslie about her brother. Lisbon showed Emma a picture of the missing lad, whom she quickly identified as the guy she had seen talk to her colleague the day before the murder.

Watching the girl talk, Lisbon knew that she was waiting for something to clear up what that thing in the back of her head was; she actually thought she had it, after that half hour.

It had to be her own mind, playing tricks on her, what with the anniversary of Jane's misfortune coming up, which had her thoughts turn in this direction more often than usual. She knew from years before that she started noticing girls around the age his daughter would have been at this time of the year, maybe because her consultant did the same thing, and she spent so much time with him.

So, with Emma's age being so close, paired with her wavy blond hair, that strangely familiar smile and the coincidence with the surname, it was not surprising that being around the girl made her wonder whether Jane's daughter would have looked like Emma at all.

Realizing that made Lisbon feel strangely sorrowful and walking her guest out the door she had an urge to make sure that this girl, at least, was alright, and her parents would know about it.

"So, how will you get back into town?" Lisbon asked, and added, with a conspirational wink, "Hey, did you tell your parents about having to come to the station? If you want, you can give them a call from my office, so they won't worry."

Lisbon wasn't prepared for the look she received. She had been hoping for some joy, but instead, Emma looked angry.

"Why are you so obsessed with parents?", she asked, stopping in mid-walk and staring at the smaller woman. "I don't have any. I grew up in an orphanage, okay?"

"I'm sorry", Lisbon said softly, after a short, breathless silence. "Really, I didn't mean to pry."

"Well", Emma said, visibly fighting to regain her calm. "I'm sorry, too. It's just, I don't usually tell people when I can avoid it. I hate it when they get all compassionate, and then they start inviting you to their house for Thanksgiving, sorry looks all around." The girl made a face. "They make me feel pitiful, and I don't like that." She flashed a smile.

At the little silence that followed Emma's outburst, Jane's voice floated in from the bullpen they were just about to pass.

"I hadn't pegged you for the kind of guy who carries his money around with him behind his ears, Rigsby."

Lisbon heard Van Pelt's snort of suppressed laughter, telling her that Jane was very bored and had been entertaining them with his magic tricks for a while. The young agent usually tried to hide her amusement, and for the first couple of tricks, she generally succeeded with this.

"Is someone doing tricks?", Emma asked, interest sparkling suddenly in her bright green eyes. Lisbon was slightly taken by surprise by this abrupt change of mood, but she wasn't complaining. Last thing she needed was having made a girl cry this early in the morning.

"It's one of our consultants. He's got a bit of a history with that kind of thing", she told the girl, smiling. "You wanna go have a look?"

When Emma nodded enthusiastically, Lisbon led the way to the bullpen's door, and they came upon her team huddled together near Cho's desk, where it's owner sat placidly in his chair, watching the proceedings with great attention nevertheless. Van Pelt was sitting on one desk corner, smiling broadly, watching the blond man standing in front of her, with Rigsby by his side. The big man was looking flustered at finding himself at the centre of attention, but watched Jane with great interest, as the other man picked coins from all over him.

"Really", Jane was remarking now, "under your shoulder? That doesn't seem like a very tasteful hiding place at all."

Lisbon smiled, and Emma gave a very audible delighted giggle, that had Jane stop and turn around to see who his extended audience was. He nodded at Lisbon, and came towards them, giving them his most charming smile.

"Young lady", he said, addressing Emma with his best stage voice, "it seems to me that you're not one to laugh, seeing as you have chosen some questionable hiding spots yourself." He stepped up to her, and plucked a coin out of her hair, holding it up to her face as proof.

Emma smiled broadly at him, and Lisbon could actually see how her smile reached her eyes this time, being more than just a scam to divert attention from the fact that she was not telling the full truth, or feeling well.

She took the coin from his hand and looked at it. Then she bit down on it, and shook her head. "That's not one of mine", she told Jane, adopting a bit of a stage voice as well. His eyebrows shot up and he eyed her with renewed interest.

"It's not?", he asked, playing along.

"No. You probably hid it there so I wouldn't notice you'd taken the other one", Emma accused him, crossing her arms in front of her and sounding insulted by him taking her for a fool. Her eyes were shining with delight.

She took a step back and gave him an exaggerated once-over.

"A-Ha!", she exclaimed then, stepping forward again. Emma lifted her hand and – pulled a shimmering coin from behind Jane's ear. "Not a good place to hide a stolen coin", she chastised him, and flashed her smile at the group at large when Rigsby and Van Pelt made whopping noises and Cho and Lisbon clapped their hands generously.

There was a cold feeling in Lisbon's stomach that had little to do with the temperature in the room and everything to do with how, after a moment to get over his surprise, Jane gave a very gracious mock-bow and, straightening up, hoisted his most charming smile back on his face.

Seeing the man and the girl standing next to each other, noting how their smiles seemed to be really the same, down to the way their eyes wrinkled, made Lisbon feel like she had fallen asleep and was dreaming a very strange, confusing dream. She felt Cho looking at her and caught his eyes.

The agent was furrowing his brow in a way that was actually noticeable, making her not the only one who was surprised.


	3. Chapter 3

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

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><p>Memory Lane<p>

Later that night, Lisbon sat in her office, her eyes on the little plastic container she kept the coin Emma had bitten on in. She had made Jane give her the coin, saying something about having to stop him from playing tricks all the time. Under all circumstances would she try to keep him out of this weird fantasy she and Cho were currently indulging.

She had asked the agent into her office a bit after Emma had left the house, under the pretext of getting an update on Leslie's case, which was coming together; they were ready for their first arrest tomorrow, and it didn't look complicated. Of course, Jane would want to play a bit, but that really wasn't the issue at the moment.

Cho had told her these things in that clipped, efficient manner of his, and then looked at her. Lisbon had known what he was getting at.

She'd sighed. "She doesn't have any parents. Orphan", she had let him know quietly, as if afraid that the sound of her voice might actually carry through the closed door across the room to where the brown leather sofa stood.

No emotion had registered on her second in command's face; she hadn't been expecting any. He'd simply nodded slowly. "Time of the year makes you think strange things, doesn't it", he'd said, as quietly as her. Then he'd watched her, silently, waiting for her to make a decision.

At that moment, Lisbon had thrown sanity and caution to the wind. "Go check her out", she'd said in a tired voice. "See if you can find the orphanage, contacts, whatever pops up. Report back as soon as you can, and don't let the others see what you're doing."

Cho had only nodded, as if there was nothing strange about her telling him to investigate a young woman that wasn't even an important witness, just reminded them both of a girl they had never known.

An hour later, he'd been back, with a slim file in his hand, holding everything he had been able to pull on Emma Jane. Without speaking, he'd put it on her table, and had silently left her office after she'd nodded her thanks.

And now she was here, caught between her phone and the doubts she was entertaining about the whole operation.

Cho had found the orphanage, and now she had a number she could call in order to find out if there really was any reason to be bothered by the whole thing, or if she was just going crazy. Sometimes she wondered how Jane did it – especially now, when his thoughts had to come back to _that_ night more often still. Did he wonder about what his daughter would have been like? What she would have looked like? Lisbon sighed exasperatedly. She didn't even know what colour his daughter's eyes had been, and right now, that would have been vital information.

The agent wasn't sure if she was glad or sorry that Emma's eyes were decidedly not blue.

Knowing that she wouldn't be able to stop thinking about this in any case, she picked up the phone and dialled a number.

"St. John Orphanage, Lancaster speaking", a woman's voice answered after the second ring tone. Lisbon took a deep breath.

"This is Teresa Haller", she began, not quite sure why she wasn't giving her real name. A nervous giggle nearly escaped her in the face of all this.

"I'm calling to enquire about Emma Jane. I believe she was an inmate at your institution?"

"What's your relation to Miss Jane?", Mrs. Lancaster asked, sounding slightly surprised. Lisbon figured it was the orphanage's policy to ask that kind of question.

"She's applied for a job at my café", she lied calmly, thinking that might be a valid reason for the woman on the other end of the line. "I usually only take in local kids I can ask around about, but Emma seems like a sensible girl, so I thought I might give her a chance."

"Oh, really?" There was a lively interest in the voice coming out of the phone now. "I thought she said she already had a job, but what do I know, eh." The woman laughed, and in front of Lisbon's inner eye the picture of a motherly, if not overly bright, woman in her late fifties appeared at the sound of that laugh. The kind of woman who would be overly worried about her own kids, and had it in her to worry about a couple more that no one else gave a thought to.

"Well, what can I tell you? Emma's a nice girl. Sensible, smart. She's going to college, you know", a note of pride crept into Mrs. Lancaster's voice now; Lisbon felt very lucky to have reached this woman who seemed so willing to talk, and probably wouldn't need a lot of coaxing to divulge a great number of details.

"She told me, yes. How long did she stay with you?"

"Well, the doctor's said when we got her that she was about three years old. What a little bundle she was. You know, I was actually on duty that night..." Lisbon had practically heard the moment Mrs. Lancaster had turned onto memory lane, not that she was complaining. This kind of thing was exactly what she'd hoped for.

"We don't get kids that way nearly as often as people think, but it happens. Someone leaves them on our doorstep, rings the bell, and when you open the door, there's no one to talk to, just a little wailing something at your feet. Not that Emma was wailing, she was actually sleeping, if I remember that right. Quiet, easy child, never gave me any trouble out of the ordinary." The woman heaved a heavy sigh. "You know, they're all a bit worrisome, and who's to say they have no reason? Thing was, when they're that age, they usually remember stuff, like their name, or what their favourite stuffed animal was, if they had a pet, that kind of thing. They're talking, you know. But Emma – she didn't give us anything. We didn't push her; you never know what happened to them, all you can do is try and keep them safe where they are now. It seemed as if she'd forgotten everything, there was nothing."

Now Lisbon tried to get a word in, so as not to give the woman the impression she wasn't interested. "I've actually been wondering about that kind of thing", she said, "How do you decide on a name for kids like that?"

"Well, depends. It's really up to whoever's on duty, but I can tell you what I did with her. See, Emma came wrapped in a blanket that had a letter on it: a big red J."

At this point, Lisbon could feel her stomach growing cold again, and something seemed to twist into itself inside of her. The woman on the other end of the line chattered on without noticing anything amiss. One of the good things about telephones, Lisbon thought wryly, much harder to gauge a reaction.

"And I've always been a bit of a fan of criminal novels and stuff like that, so I know you call a person you know nothing about a John Doe. So I thought to myself: here I have a little Jane Doe, and I'm just gonna make the J stand for Jane, see? There's a couple of other kids that go by the name of Doe, you know. Usually, when they get adopted, which you hope for, of course, they'll take on their foster's family name, so no worries there, but I figured, you don't want too many with the same name, see –"

Lisbon interrupted the lady, having attained the information that was most crucial to her, she tried to get her talking about other things.

"But Emma's name still is Jane. So she never was adopted?", she asked.

Mrs. Lancaster didn't seem to mind having been interrupted. "No, never was. She went to a couple families, but she didn't stay with any of them. I never had the kind of problem with her they had, but she always came back for one reason or the other. To give you my honest opinion, I think she didn't want to leave the orphanage. Some of them get these ideas that their parents will come looking for them, and I think she just wanted to stay in the same place, and wait for them..." There was a small pause. "Poor thing", she added, and then, as if she'd just remembered it, "Of course, there was the funny business with that one visitor she used to have and maybe that played a role as well."

"Isn't that really unusual? An orphan having a visitor?" Lisbon asked, growing colder by the minute, and not really sure what she wanted to know all this for, especially since she was pretending to be Emma's employer.

The orphanage lady didn't seem to mind at all. She happily replied: "It happens. Loners, people with no family, sometimes they get it into their heads to help an orphan, you know. I just assumed it was that way with him, I've never seen him. He always came on her birthday, and that's the same day my grandchild was born, so I take that day off. She didn't seem to mind, so I figured, can't do any harm, can it? And seeing as he donated for her to be able to have her college interviews, it did her good in the end, didn't it? His name always made me laugh, though – did you ever see "You've got Mail"?", she asked, rather abruptly.

"Er – I think so, yeah", Lisbon answered, unsure. It had been a while, but Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan sprang to mind.

"One of my favourite movies, I've got to say, such a nice story. Anyways, the guy's called Fox in the movie, right? Joe Fox", she said with relish, as if she was tasting the name and finding it delicious.

"And now guess what little Emma's visitor's name was!" Mrs. Lancaster lowered her voice dramatically. When she continued, she made every letter count, "It was John Fox – isn't that a funny coincidence?"

Lisbon gave a laugh that sounded decidedly not honest in her own ears. Could this really be a coincidence? She knew she didn't really believe it when she noticed how she'd jumped violently on hearing the sound of the name, and had actually stretched out her hand, ready to grab her keys.

"That's funny", she managed. And then, "Well, Mrs. Lancaster, thank you so much for taking the time to talk to me!"

If Mrs. Lancaster was put off by the abrupt end of the conversation, she didn't show it. She very agreeably said it had been a pleasure, and that she hoped Lisbon would give Emma the job, seeing how she seemed a very nice lady, and Emma could use good people in her life.

After promising to look after the girl to the best of her abilities, Lisbon finally hung up.

The silence that followed the sound of her own voice was ringing in her ears. She'd known she was tense, but now that she had time to think about it, she felt that the tightness in her stomach had increased to the point where it was actually painful.

Also, she felt like there was a major headache coming on. With a groan, Lisbon leaned forward and buried her face in her hands. What to do? If this was a normal case, she would put Van Pelt on this John Fox, to try and see if she could maybe trace the donations.

Seeing as the younger agent had gone home already, Lisbon decided to put following that particular road off until the morning. She still felt cold, but there was also a sense of direction now. If there was anything to be unearthed, she was going to unearth whatever the hell it was.

The agent had already gotten to the door when she turned around one last time and went to the drawer at the back of her office, pulling open one of the topmost drawers and taking out a file that had been sitting there ever since Jane first joined her team, putting it into her bag, next to the package she needed to post.


	4. Chapter 4

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

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><p>A Face First<p>

When Lisbon returned to the office the next morning, some things had been cleared up in her head. Little Charlotte Jane had been unrecognizable in her death, a surprising thing considering Red John's usual methods, but then the killer didn't usually go after children.

No one had taken the trouble to delve further into her identity; it had simply been assumed that she was who she appeared to be, case closed.

Of course, Jane had been the last to pose any doubts. The funeral had been arranged as fast as possible, and since then, the matter had been laid to rest.

Lisbon had actually lain wide awake long hours during that night, thinking she had to be crazy to even consider the possibility that dead Charlotte hadn't in fact been Charlotte at all, but some other poor girl.

She had to admit though, that for a person so intent on punishing Jane, taking away his daughter and having her grow up as an orphan made perfect, cold sense. It was the ideal leverage. It was so perfect it made her skin crawl thinking about how Jane would react if things actually were what her gut was telling her.

And she could imagine the situation Red John might have been preparing for all along: a last show down, and then, when things were coming to a close one way or the other, having this ace up his sleeve.

It made him invincible, really, even if they won. Furrowing her brows, Lisbon tried to remember when this had become about winning, but she couldn't.

Walking into the CBI headquarters, she felt like the weight of the world was on her shoulders. There were so many things to think of now that her head felt ready to burst.

First, it had to be established if her and Cho's crazy hunch had any real substance to it; she would take Jane and Rigsby killer-hunting, and have Grace run the check on this John Fox. Cho could fill her in, as far as he deemed necessary.

Lisbon felt sure that Jane had come up with a clever way to trick the murderer into revealing him or herself already, he just had to be coaxed into showing his cards a bit earlier than he might have liked. Today, she didn't feel like forcing the team to follow the well trodden paths of law enforcement when they had Jane to cut them shortcuts whenever he liked. Today, she had more important things on her mind.

Teresa didn't think it would take Grace long to find a connection, if one existed. The younger agent knew what to look for, by now, and she was good at that kind of thing.

As soon as she had anything, Cho would go get the girl back in. They had an address, and according to her schedule, Emma was working the morning shift today, so if all went well, they could have her safe and sound inside the CBI building before lunch time.

Then, get a face for Red John. The mere thought made her heart beat faster. She'd been working the case long enough to feel the excitement of a possible step closer to the killer keenly, even without the added emotional connection that was Patrick Jane.

And after that, hide the kid. That was actually the part that had her worried the most. They didn't know where Red John was, but he'd proven himself privy of confidential information before, so she wasn't really sure who to trust with this.

And if she knew one thing, then that if she was right, Charlotte Jane could not, and would not, be lost again. What she couldn't say was how Jane would react. There was a wide range from blinding rage to bottomless sorrow, and she really couldn't place the way she thought he'd react.

Lisbon knew that she owed it to him to get all the facts straight before letting him in on what was going on. First things first, though.

First, the connection to Red John. Then, maybe, the other thing.


	5. Chapter 5

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

* * *

><p>Stepping Stones<p>

When I got up this morning, things seemed normal. Well, mostly.

Leslie was still dead, but in a way, that didn't touch my life that much. You learn not to get too close to people when you grow up the way I did. They never stick around, and I had only known her for six weeks.

I was glad to be in town again; I disliked having to go back to Denver during holidays. Spending Thanksgiving or Christmas or just the summer break there made me feel even more alone than when I spent them here, where I was truly alone, but at least I wasn't constantly reminded of my lack of a family by the presence of others like me. Lanny wasn't helping, either, being all warm and caring one minute and home with her own family the next.

No, being in town made me feel like I was in control of my life. So, today started out like a good day, and things didn't start going wrong until I stepped out of the coffee shop and almost on top of a man waiting for me outside the door.

It was the Asian-looking agent I had talked to two days ago. He'd seemed nice enough then, but right now, he was looking even more serious than usual. Without hesitating, he took my arm, as if to make sure I didn't run off – a ridiculous notion, since I don't even jog, and he looked ready for some serious running – and asked me, quietly, to follow him to the headquarters again. There had been a new development, and they needed me there to confirm something for them.

The idea of going there again made me uneasy.

First, I had kind of freaked out there the last time, and I didn't usually do that. The prospect of seeing the person who had witnessed my lapse once more didn't help either, because I dreaded it might happen again, after I'd been honest with her. The terrible sadness that I usually kept further from the surface was still very close to my consciousness, and I knew that as long as I was in this state, I was prone to emotional outbursts, which I didn't like. You don't want to draw attention to the fact that you're a lonely, unstable individual. It attracts the wrong kind of people.

Secondly, I felt that the agent had pushed me quite hard, and on a subject that hadn't even been related to Leslie at all, which made me queasy. It had seemed as if there'd been something else bothering her, something that had nothing to do with Leslie at all and everything to do with me.

I had no idea what it was. It scared me, and I highly doubted that this Agent Cho was here because of my colleague.

Sitting behind the table in that interrogation room again made me even uneasier. I knew there was a one-way mirror, and there might be people behind it that I couldn't see, a thought I hated.

So far, I hadn't seen any of the other agents I had met the last time. Agent Cho and I were alone.

I knew I was fidgeting, and I could see him noticing it, but I couldn't help it. Instead, I gave him a smile, because I've learned it's better to smile than to appear angry, which was my other option.

"So, what's this new development you want my opinion on?" I asked, after I couldn't stand the silence any more.

He looked at me gravely. I realized he wasn't trying to make me nervous by prolonging the silence; it was more like he didn't quite know how to start. That realization calmed me down a bit; as long as I wasn't the only one in the room suffering from nerves, I could deal with it.

"You said it was about Leslie?" I offered.

I could tell that I had given him his opening now. He leaned forward, looking at me intently, starting to speak slowly.

"We've been investigating a serial killer here in this unit for some years now", agent Cho began slowly. I was confused. Was Leslie supposed to be a serial killer's victim?

"We did some digging into your background, and it turns out that you might know our man." He paused, giving me another serious look, as if trying to see if his words were hitting home. I wondered briefly what my face told him, because I wasn't sure about it. I tried to think of everybody I had known in my life – not that there had been all that many people.

Summer afternoons I secretly dreaded sprang to my mind, the weeks leading up to them feeling like they were covered in nervous sweat even in my memory. I suddenly felt very weak, and I knew I had gone pale. I stared at the agent like he was a car racing towards me, and I was a rabbit stuck on the road.

He returned my look calmly, and suddenly I felt as if he was the most real person I had ever met. He was the only one that mattered right now, anyway, and I concentrated on him, on the fact that he was there, appearing calm and self-assured again, like a rock. I never learned to trust anybody else with my secrets and innermost feelings, it's not something you have the opportunity to do, growing up in an orphanage.

At the same time, I knew that he was asking me to trust him with this, with what might be my best-guarded secret, something I never even thought about if I could help it. I looked at the calm-faced agent across the shiny black table and I felt something inside me break. If he asked me the right questions, I would answer. But I couldn't bring myself to approach the matter myself, he would have to lead me there, because the thought alone had my heart beating violently against my ribcage and blood rushing loudly in my ears.

I brought my eyes back to his, and remained silent.

"What do you know about a man named John Fox?" the agent asked, quietly, keeping his eyes on mine, as if offering them as foothold for me.

I drew a very shaky breath, leaning back against the back rest of my chair for support.

"Nothing" I answered, as calmly as I could.


	6. Chapter 6

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

* * *

><p>Much Ado About Nothing<p>

At that moment, the door to the interrogation room flew open with a crash. I jumped so violently I almost lost my balance, and turned to see the blond man who had done the magic tricks storming in, the female cop following him more slowly. She closed the door behind her, while he came straight to stand next to agent Cho.

The blond man seemed so tightly wound I was surprised he wasn't shouting, or tearing at his hair.

A hand suddenly touched my shoulder and I jumped again; it was the woman, the one called Lisbon. There was an odd look on her face, halfway between tenderness and a forced calm.

It barely had time to register before the blond man leaned forward, putting his two hands on the table, and said, very quietly, in a voice that cut like steel: "We all know very well that that isn't true."

I stared up at him; his eyes were a piercing shade of blue, and I remembered how I'd thought him a friendly, even a charming man. He scared me, now. I tried to catch Cho's eye, but the younger agent wasn't looking at me, his glance jumped from the woman standing by my side to the angry man next to him.

It was the woman who answered, in a voice that sounded almost tired. "Don't jump at her like that, Jane." At the sound of my name, I twisted my neck to see who she was talking to; she was looking at the man across from her. "She's ready to talk. Aren't you?" she added, looking down on me.

I drew another breath, more scared than ever, now.

I felt like I had agreed to something I couldn't go through with, but had to, all the same. Cho had made me feel like I could trust him with this thing I knew in my heart, but the way the other two had barged in had effectively ruined that moment. Almost desperately, I asked myself if they weren't supposed to know better than that, but it was too late in any case.

I closed my eyes, desperately looking for something resembling safety inside of myself, seeing as there was nowhere to rely on out there, but the man who seemed to share my name broke through my concentration.

"Look at me", he said, in a voice that was quite different from the one he had used only moments before. I opened my eyes and eyed him carefully. There was an air of calmness about him now that was obviously forced, but seemed like a promise that I didn't need to be afraid. His voice was calm again, quiet still, but I could tell that he was on his way back to the charming persona I had seen before.

I followed his command. His eyes were friendly again, and even though he wasn't calm, he was obviously trying to make me feel safe again. "Why don't you tell us what it is that you know about John Fox."

I tried to take slow, measured breaths.

"Nothing", I said again, but hurried to add, "He never told me anything about himself."

I could almost see the look that passed between Cho and Lisbon, who was still standing beside me, a hand on my shoulder. It seemed to say, "He overreacted again". Whatever it was they hoped to find, it was that man Jane who was the most desperate to hear it.

Before they could ask further questions, I plunged on.

"I only saw him three times. He came on my birthdays. My eight, my ninth, and my tenth. I don't even know why, he never said." For a moment, it made me feel like crying, admitting to these three people that I didn't know why someone would come to see me on my birthday. I took another breath and gave them what I assumed it was they wanted the most.

"He was... not a tall man. Maybe about your height" I said, pointing a weak hand at the other Jane in the room. "Blond as well, but he didn't have curls, and his hair was very light, almost white in the sunshine at times." I shuddered. "Blue eyes. The way he talked, he sounded like an educated man, but not... overly so. Didn't have an accent. Not an academic, I think. He always wanted to know how my life was, if I had any friends, liked school, did La- Mrs. Lancaster and the nurses treat me and the other kids alright, these kinds of things. I think he might have paid for my interviews at the colleges, but I'm not sure. Mrs. Lancaster once said something that made me think he might have", I finished quietly.

The three agents had been watching me closely. I was hurting all over, feeling sick.

"Did he ever do anything to you?", agent Lisbon asked in a very controlled voice, that made me feel like she actually cared a lot about the answer.

I shook my head. "No. Nothing. He never staid longer than an hour, and there was always someone close by. But..." I wanted to go on, but had to catch my breath before. "But there was something about him that scared me. He had a way of looking at me, it was like – I recognized it later, when I was older, sixteen, seventeen, it felt a bit like the kind of look older men give young girls when they're thinking about... things", I came to a faltering halt. "Only it didn't really feel like he was interested in these thoughts at the moment; like he was saving them for later, or for other women." I shuddered again.

"Actually, when I saw men looking at me when I was older, there was a difference. I never felt that I had to be scared of any of them, you know? It might be a bit uncomfortable, but they would always try to turn it into a joke, and if you couldn't take that, you could always just avoid them. But with Mr. Fox – if I'd ever met a man who'd looked at me like that, later, I would have turned around and ran away as fast as I could." I paused, thoughtful for a moment. "But then, I guess by the time you'd get to see that look, there'd be nowhere left to run to."

"I hated it when he came", I continued, looking at the table, at the gleaming black of it, "but I felt that I must never let him know that. So I acted normal, never told any of the other kids about him and pretended to be happy to have a visitor in front of the grown-ups."

A sudden thought struck me, and I lifted my gaze. For some reason, I focused on the blond man, who was standing stiffly upright, his eyes on my face, but for a moment, he seemed to be somewhere else at the same time. As soon as I made eye-contact, I could feel him come back to the present.

"If Mr. Fox is your guy, you won't let him get to me, will you?", I asked, and I could hear the panic that was suddenly racing through my body creeping into my voice. "He won't like that I told you."

The man closed his eyes for a moment, which did nothing to calm me down. I jumped up, knocking the woman's hand off my shoulder in the process. "You made me tell you! If he comes for me because of it, it's your fault if I die!" I had begun loudly, but in the end I was positively shouting.

"Don't worry", Agent Lisbon said, next to me. "We'll get you into Witness Protection, there's no way he's going to find you."

She didn't sound convincing to me. I sat down heavily on my chair again, because I didn't know what else to do. This room seemed to be the one safe place left in the world.

"But that means I have to quit college, and move, and never talk to anyone I know again", I said, trying to come to terms with the way my whole world had changed in the matter of an hour.

"How could you not have told me that before you asked me to trust you with this?"


	7. Chapter 7

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

* * *

><p>Shards<p>

"How could you not have told me this before I walked in on her?" Jane demanded from his chair. He was clutching his cup of tea, Lisbon noted with a detached sense of wry amusement, rather than balancing it nonchalantly on its saucer in his left hand the way he usually did. Yet that was the only outward sign of distress the tall man was showing, mere minutes after she had given him news that must be playing havoc with his world.

If it had been her, Teresa mused, that teacup would have been reduced to shards by now, because she would definitely have dropped it. Then again, she wasn't one to carry teacups around with her, maybe due to that very lack of self control. Also, reaching for your gun without having to put a teacup down first was definitely the faster way…

Intent on not giving him the slightest reason to fly off on her, Lisbon spread her hands in a gesture of reassurance and answered calmly, "I didn't want to say anything before it was certain. The lab results arrived five minutes ago."

Patrick Jane, the man whose daughter had just risen from the dead, metaphorically speaking, carefully put down his tea on Lisbon's desk, got up and walked over to the window, where he stood, his back to Teresa, without saying another word.

The agent decided it was better to let him have all the time he wanted to digest her revelation, and busied herself once more with staring at the computer screen, as she had done for the last fifteen minutes.

Alright, so she had stretched the truth a bit with those "five minutes", but she couldn't be expected to call in the man whose miracle this was without calming down a bit first, could she?

Plus, it was her who had run the final comparison of Patrick and "Emma" Jane's DNA on which everything hinged.

It was her who had stealthily managed to gain access to a computer belonging to a random CBI agent, her who had taken a lot of supposedly soothing deep breaths, re-run the analysis three times, checked the CBI's internal FAQ on DNA results to see how trustworthy they were, covered her eyes and looked again, avoided a minor emotional breakdown and managed to sneak back to her own office again, inviting her consultant in with her as she went.

Teresa pulled up the final diagram of the analysis she had saved on her disk drive and threw a glance at Jane's back. She had expected a rather contained reaction, but she still didn't like his silence.

"Would you like to see?", she addressed the man by the window in a soft voice.

Without saying a word, Patrick Jane turned around and slowly walked over to stand behind Teresa. She gave a quick explanation of the picture on her computer screen, waiting for him to open his mouth and give her some hint of what he might be feeling – Jane was in control again, and from the way he was moving, nobody could have told he'd just received any news of emotional significance at all.

"This is certain", he finally said, his voice too weak to make it a question. Teresa quickly glanced at him – the strain was becoming visible now; she just hoped he wouldn't crack for good.

"Yes", she answered. "I went over the reliability and all that, and it seems there's no room for a mistake here."


	8. Chapter 8

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

* * *

><p>Safety Call<p>

I was sitting in my safety cell, as I had come to call the living room of my top secret apartment, when my phone rang. Busy staring into space as I had been, the noisy reminder of reality startled me. Cautiously reaching for the receiver, I reminded myself of what the lady agent had said when I'd seen her last, a week ago.

"If the phone rings, pick up. It's a secure line, only two people at the CBI have the number." The small woman had paused, and then she'd put a hand on my arm, and had added, in a quiet voice, a fierce look on her face, "Apart from that, whatever happens, try and stay here. We don't know who and how many he's got, it's safer this way."

Of course I had been thinking about what they would do. As soon as Lisbon told me they were going to put me in "a safe location" instead of getting me into witness protection as fast as possible, the wheels in the back of my head started turning, and by the time we had reached this "safe flat", I was fairly certain they were going to include me in some sort of plan to lure the bad guy out.

Red John.

I had heard the name before, but if you'd asked me two weeks ago to name infamous serial killers, I probably wouldn't have been able to come up with it. I had known that name the way you know things you heard a few times without attaching any significance to them, which is to say not at all. I still shivered at the thought that the horrible name tied together with the face that, aside from Lanny's, belonged to the only adult constant of my childhood.

I hadn't asked Lisbon what he'd done, exactly. Right away, I had decided it didn't do to dwell on it, my head was too full of ideas and fears without me adding the cruel details of reality to it. In the first few days I had spent in this flat, my mind had been coming back to it again and again – to the secret monster that I had felt hiding in my visitor's gaze all those years ago.

Why he had singled me out to be his little project I refused to think about.

What he would do if I was to ever meet him again, which would probably mean that Lisbon, Cho and the strange blonde man had failed, I didn't care to find out either.

So I was spending my days in a kind of limbo, confined to my safety cell, eating all kinds of ready-made food that took decidedly too little time to prepare to take my mind off anything.

The place was small, but thankfully, the entire length of the living room's wall was taken up by a massive bookshelf, which included a section of bad romantic novels featuring steadfast Scottish Lords in skirts, barbaric Native Americans invariably turning out to be way more civil than their white adversaries and damsels in disguise, only waiting for the right man to find themselves in distress for.

For a few days, I had amused myself with laughing at their attics, all the while enjoying the mild arousal that came with the descriptions of all those torrid passions. I've found that, when you're locked up inside for unknown quantities of time, there's no way to feel more alive than enjoying the fact that you've a sex drive.

About two days ago however, this kind of amusement had finally turned stale, since it reminded me too much of my lack of a partner in crime. I turned to watching the DVDs occupying the cupboard under the television. By now, I felt like I was floating along in some bubble, like there was no way anyone out there would reach out and burst the invisible membrane that separated me from them.

And now the phone was ringing at last.

"Yes", I said, holding the receiver to the side of my face.

There was no answer, and suddenly I felt like my heart was turning into an icicle, brittle and ready to break any moment.

Someone was breathing on the other end of the line, deep, measured breaths, but they didn't bother to speak.

I threw the receiver back down and stood, my own heavy breathing loud in my ears, staring at the phone. I felt like my heart was freezing in my chest. There was no doubt in my mind whatsoever: He'd found me.

He was coming for me.

There was nothing I could do.


	9. Chapter 9

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

* * *

><p>Fangs<p>

Just one short month ago, Teresa Lisbon mused, she probably would have tried to arrest people bringing up Charlotte Jane in the vicinity of her consultant. Now she was this person. Shifting her weight ever so slightly, the small woman tried to get her thigh off a particularly nasty chunk of debris, which felt like it had grown teeth.

During the planning sessions leading to the creation of the trap she was currently playing the left fang of, it had been her who'd insisted aloud on the utmost importance of the security measures for Emma Jane. It had made Lisbon feel slightly guilty, because she did know her team, knew that they would have taken this seriously no matter who they were actively endangering, but they hadn't told Rigsby and van Pelt that Emma Jane, the orphan from Denver, had been proven to be Charlotte Jane, the murder victim. So Teresa had made the point of this girl's importance as a witness in Red John's trial very clear, at least twice more than she would have done normally.

The cold from the concrete surface she was laying on was seeping through her clothes. Her roof was littered with rubble, leftovers from the deconstruction of the building next door which no-one had taken the trouble of clearing away. It wasn't a very nice neighbourhood, Lisbon thought, sweeping her gaze along the empty road below, but that made the place an ideal hide-out. Night was falling, providing natural cover since the light of the street lamps threw long shadows across the roof. The lump of concrete she'd set up camp behind painted the ground around her a deep shade of shadow, and the deformed metal bars sticking out of it were a gift from God. They added irregularity to the shape of her cover, which meant that the barrel of her gun, which would make an appearance around the side of the concrete soon, was easy to overlook.

Jane, whom she'd wished good-luck almost three hours ago, had kept up a calm demeanour ever since that afternoon in her office a week ago. On the one hand, this was exactly what she would have asked of him anyway, since it wouldn't do to announce the latest development in the Red John-case to the wider public; on the other hand, as a human being, Teresa had a very hard time dealing with his self-control.

The agent hadn't heard Jane say Emma's name once; maybe this was why she had been so determined to keep the girl on everybody's minds. Maybe it also had to do with how Emma's father seemed focused on Red John, not on dealing with the fact he had a daughter again. Well, Lisbon thought, berating herself for what felt like the thousandths time, maybe he just didn't tell you!

She could understand how hard it must be for him; how do you go about telling an eighteen-year old girl that she's the daughter you thought was killed by a mad men intent on getting revenge for something you said on a TV-show fifteen years ago? Lisbon was fairly certain Jane was scared witless by the prospect of having that conversation, but he had avoided the subject in that stubborn way of his, which meant he hadn't had a conversation with either her or Cho outside of meetings for a week.

Maybe Jane had been trying to hold on to his sanity by playing "Dead Daughter" for a little while longer, and who was she to blame him for it? Still, some part of her had been hurt by what she couldn't help but interpret as a lack of trust.

When she thought of the expression her consultant had worn when he'd left the station to set their plan in motion today, Teresa felt bad about her own feelings of betrayal.

For the first time, she'd gotten a glimpse of the emotions that had probably been raging through him all this while; there had been something in Jane's blue eyes that made her certain that if they failed, there was no way this man could be put back together again. Hope and memory had made him vulnerable, and the problem was, Lisbon could feel it to.

Even though she had no right to it, and was very careful not to voice these sentiments around Jane, or anyone else in fact, part of her felt about Emma the way she'd felt about her brothers when they'd been little.

A movement on the street below caught Lisbon's attention. She glanced over to the window behind which she knew Cho was hiding, but it just stared back at her blankly, the light of the street lamps reflecting off the glass pane. Red John had made his call to the safety apartment two hours and thirty-five minutes ago; they were perfectly on schedule at the moment, Jane and his adversary.

Teresa reached for her gun and focused on the road.


	10. Chapter 10

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

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><p>Waiting Calls<p>

I'd never known how long three hours can be.

I watched the light move over the walls of my cell, all thoughts of safety forgotten, and wondered how I had never seen how unbelievably strange and wonderful the turning of the Earth is; how I could have wasted even one evening without watching the clouds grow rosy cheeks and puffy brows, and never noticed how much space there is between us down here and the sky up there.

Nothing happened.

Finally, when I was staring into the orange glow of a city night dry eyed, hoping to get a glimpse of a star, the phone rang once more.

At first, I just sat there, like I had already left this mundane world in which there are things like phones and people calling, expecting you to pick up when you're there.

But when the phone didn't stop ringing, I moved away from the window and walked over to where the noise was coming from. My fingers were numb, but I managed to bring the receiver up to my ear.

"Yes." My throat felt raw. My voice rang false in my own ears. I had fully expected to never hear it again.

"Emma?", a woman's voice said, loudly. "Thank God you're still there, I was afraid you'd take matters into your own hands!" I realized it was agent Lisbon talking to me, and my heart thumped loudly in my chest. "Are you alright? You don't have to worry any more, we got him!"

In the background, I could hear men shouting and the loud voice of a woman trying to talk over it all.

I sat down on the floor because my knees gave in. "You... got him?", I whispered, and now I was crying for real.

Three days had passed since "they got him". This had left me with sufficient time to calm down enough to grow bored and rather annoyed by how in the dark I was being kept.

For example, what was that supposed to mean, "we got him"? Did they catch him, or did they succeed in shooting him? Was he hit, or shot dead? Was he in jail or in the morgue?

It wasn't like whatever happened to Red John was of no consequence to me, I reflected morosely – if there was to be a trial, I was surely going to be called upon as a witness. If he was dead, I was one of two people who could identify him. Additionally, I didn't know whether my name had been in the news – my television only played DVDs, after all, and there was no radio. If it had been, going to college was going to be tough, at least for a few months.

Also, the fact that I'd just disappeared for ten days without so much as a word to the people at the café didn't sit too well with me. At the time, my job had been pretty far down the list of my priorities, but it seemed like it was back on top after all, now that I could tick off "staying alive". The boss was not going to be happy. Hopefully, he had not found anyone else yet.

So when the phone finally rang, I was slow to answer it out of pure spite. After staring at it ringing for 13 times, I picked up halfway through the fourteenth ring. The sound died abruptly.

"Yes?"; I said, rather more polite than I felt like doing.

A small silence greeted me, and then a male voice answered, almost reluctantly.

"Ms. Jane?", it said. "This is... Patrick Jane, from the CBI."

Another pause followed.

What a strange way to begin a conversation when you're a professional, I thought. When he hadn't said anything else for an uncomfortably long time, I jumped in.

"Yes, Mr. Jane, I remember. What is it?" I asked, and added, when a scary thought struck me, "How's agent Lisbon?"


	11. Chapter 11

Disclaimer: The Mentalist doesn't belong to me, no money made

* * *

><p>Normal<p>

Teresa Lisbon was standing outside her own locked office door, trying very hard to keep the smile on her face as small as possible. Cho looked unabashed on her left side, his arms crossed, gazing intently through the glass at the silhouette standing behind her desk. Van Pelt was over at her own table, her mobile in hand.

"He's on the phone right now", Lisbon heard her whisper excitedly. "Of course it's Emma, who else?"

Teresa chuckled under her breath; Rigsby was still in hospital, but he was being kept well informed. They were all of them positively giddy with a combination of relief and expectation, even Cho, who looked almost smug at the moment. Lisbon had become fond of telling them all that happy endings weren't for real life these past few days, but she couldn't help but feel that there were some things that really ought to happen.

It had taken three days to get her consultant to make this phone-call. At times, Teresa had worried about Emma. All she knew for sure was that the girl hadn't left the flat yet, which was something, at least, but there was no way of telling how she was dealing. Involuntarily, a shiver ran down the agent's back; she could almost feel the CBI psychologists breathing down her neck, insisting the girl was in dire need of their attention and couldn't possibly survive the prolonged strain of being kept in the dark without severe damages to her mental health.

Lisbon had more faith in Emma; although, she admitted to herself, if it hadn't been Jane she was trying to coax into action, she would have given in sooner.

Most of the time, Teresa thought, blankly staring at the glass pane hiding her consultant, she'd worried what it would mean for Jane and Emma's relationship if it wasn't him who laid the cards on the table for her.

So she had waited, making it clear that it was his responsibility to make contact, trying to make him see her reasoning, which she was actually sure her pseudo-psychic colleague grasped anyway. Still, all he had done, for two days, was look at her with those infuriatingly calm blue eyes, and nod.

Lisbon could feel a smile tug at her lips when she thought of how angry his lack of emotions had made her. It wasn't until today, when she'd driven over to his house, angry and scared at the same time, that she'd gotten a glimpse of what was really going on.

At first, she'd thought she had somehow messed up the address. Teresa hadn't been able to see the front of the house for the trucks parked in the drive way, and there had been a dozen men milling about, all of them busy noisily trimming, cutting, cleaning and power-hosing the building and the garden into shape.

As Lisbon had slowly climbed out of her car, trying to take it all in, she'd spotted a familiar blonde head next to the truck in front of her. Walking up to her consultant, she couldn't help but think how domestic the scene was – the man of the house taking care of business, as her own father would have put it.

Jane in a domestic light wasn't something Lisbon cared to see, really; it made him too much of a normal man. A normal man with tousled hair and a handsome face, who had nice shoulders and a smile that could melt icebergs... Out of habit, Teresa firmly stopped her thoughts at this point. Jane, her consultant, who might be playful, funny and even care sometimes, was not a normal man, she told herself firmly.

Normal, in this case, meant accessible, if she was honest with herself, accessible in ways that she'd had a very hard time stopping to think about when she'd first met him. Not for the first time, the dark-haired woman wondered what would change due to Emma's appearance.

Something had already changed, today had been prove enough of that.

When she'd come up to the tall man standing in his driveway this morning, he'd turned around to greet her as if he'd been waiting for her to show up. "I'm surprised you kept yourself from coming for as long as you did", he'd said instead of a greeting, blunt as usual. "I really wanted your opinion on this", Jane had added, without a trace of his usual irony, looking down on her.

Lisbon could feel her breath hitch just from remembering her consultant's expression, which had been as unguarded as she'd ever hoped to see it. What had stuck with her most of all was the insecurity lurking in Jane's eyes and the way he seemed to count her so matter-of-factly as someone he could turn to for advice, almost as if this was a given, the way it is for relatives, or close friends, or lovers. All of a sudden, she'd understood some of the things that had kept him so distanced these last few days.

Jane was scrambling to build a place he could welcome his daughter into, build it from loneliness, hollow ruins and half-remembered notions of how it ought to be. He was scared it wouldn't be enough; he was trying to cover all the bases before approaching Emma, keeping himself busy at the same time.

"It looks great", Teresa had said, after the flash of understanding had passed between them, even though she couldn't see half of it. He'd smiled, and their hands had met, surprising Lisbon; it was quite normal for her to unthinkingly reach out, but she'd never actually taken his hand before. The man next to her must have done the same thing, she'd realized, a strange gladness flowing into her heart at the thought.

Jane had kept her hand in his, walking her around the site, pointing out what he was having done, telling her why, and all the while allowing her to see that he was excited, nervous even.

"This is perfectly fine", Lisbon had assured him when he'd made her look at all the walls he'd had repainted, squeezing her consultant's hand, which was warm and felt oddly familiar. "Really, Jane, I think this is the part you don't have to worry about."

He'd looked at her once more, his half-smile telling Teresa he knew very well she was trying to get him to acknowledge the difficult part, the one that involved actually talking to his child, and being subtle about it. He'd taken a deep breath, gripped her hand harder, and then he'd simply followed the agent to her car.

Driving to the station had been a quiet affair. At last Jane had broken it when she'd turned the corner into the CBI parking lot.

"Lisbon", he'd said, carefully, "Would it be too much to ask if I wanted you to call me Patrick?"

So here she was now, giddy not only with relief but also with a kind of hopeful happiness she hadn't felt in years, watching a man called Patrick hang up the phone in her office.


	12. Chapter 12

Hello everybody who is still reading this! It's taken forever, I know, but I've finally finished the next chapter :) There'll be one more epilogey kind of thing, but that's it then, in my opinion.

Thanks to everyone who left a review! They are very much appreciated, and I'm not responding to them because I haven't figured out how to do that efficiently. Maybe it's not possible, but I haven't gotten round to verifying either possibility, so I'm appologizing. I read them, though, and I'm happy about them, so thank you.

As ever, this is not mine, and I'm not making any money with it.

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><p>12. Flowers on your wall<p>

They'd decided to sit in the bullpen, Teresa and Patrick, and on the couch they sat when four familiar people turned the corner. The man next to her tensed at the sight of them, but Lisbon couldn't help smiling.

Cho was leading the way, calm as ever, but with an undeniable spring in his step. Emma's blond head was visible behind him only because she was slightly taller than the agent, and she came flanked by Rigsby and Grace. The two of them had insisted on picking her up, and on leaving Patrick at the station.

"I want to have a look at her before she freaks out", Rigsby had declared when he'd walked in this morning, arm in plaster, officially on sick leave. "I'm the one who got shot. I want to go see Emma before she turns into Charlotte."

Grace had been less forthcoming, but quite as determined. She'd pointed out that it wouldn't do to have _the conversation_ in a car, and that it would be weird if Jane came to pick up his daughter, kept silent in the car and suddenly sprang the news on Emma once they'd entered the station. All of which was valid reasoning, so Lisbon had decreed that Cho, whom Emma knew, would take the rest of her team and pick the girl up, while she and Patrick waited.

Her consultant had proposed that she stay during _the conversation_, without giving his reasons, but Lisbon guessed he simply wanted a second, slightly less partial person there, someone who would mayhap be able to step in when things got out of hand. Patrick wasn't one to spell everything out, only slightly better than Jane in this regard, but he did give hints.

Like now, when he took her hand and held on to it as Cho approached with his tail. Lisbon squeezed it in what she hoped was a reassuring fashion, warmth pooling in her belly at his touch. Patrick, a normal man, after all. The thought made her heart flutter, which she took care not to dwell on as she rose slowly, pulling on his hand before letting go, and stepped forward to greet her team and the girl.

Teresa had tried to figure out how to get into _the conversation_ without sounding ominous, while still conveying that something important was left to discuss. She'd settled on taking the whole thing into her office, relying on the room itself to lend an air of seriousness, allowing her to keep the encounter rather informal.

"Welcome back", Lisbon said, smiling at her agents, and then at the girl herself, after Cho had drifted over to Rigsby's side and she could see Emma herself. For a moment, she wondered with almost clinical interest whether the girl would keep that name, or take on the one the parents she'd never known had given her, and what it would mean either way.

Emma was paler than she had been; it hadn't taken her light skin long to lose the tan she'd had when Lisbon had first run into her. She was also bright-eyed and more relaxed than the agent had expected her to be; a small smile seemed to bid its time in the corner of her mouth as she stood between Rigsby and Grace. Her eyes flickered to somewhere behind Teresa, letting the agent know where Patrick was hovering, before settling on the smaller woman in front of her.

The girl's smile spread from its corner across her face, dancing in her eyes. "It's good to see you, agent Lisbon", Emma greeted Teresa, whose answering smile came swiftly and naturally. Her father's daughter, the agent noted, surprised despite herself by the easy charm the girl exuded when relaxed. Maybe that's what Patrick was like, back in the day. She heard him move to stand on her left side.

"Hello", he told Emma, and stopped. Teresa hurried to speak up, before it became too obvious that Patrick Jane was lost for words.

"It's good to see you, too. I take it my agents took good care of you on the way here?"

In response, Emma laughed quietly, took a small step forward, away from Lisbon's team, and leaned forward ever so slightly, dropping her voice as she answered.

"Absolutely. I'm sure it's only routine in situations like these, but they almost made me feel like royalty."

Rigsby had the grace to shuffle his feet and Grace herself reddened slightly, while Cho met Lisbon's raised eyebrow with a blank look and a small curl of the right corner of his mouth.

"Well, we are definitely all happy to have you back in one piece", Patrick replied, in the smooth voice Lisbon had come to know as the one he used when he was staging a situation.

"Why don't we move the party to my office?", Lisbon suggested, all of a sudden light-headed with anticipation.

Emma turned willingly enough and headed off in the direction of Teresa's office. When her back was turned, the agent grabbed blindly for Patricks hand. It felt cold in hers, and she held it tightly for a few steps. Lisbon was uncertain as to how she could make the man who was officially still her consultant feel that she had his back; the notion that he would want her support still astounded her. Before Emma could reach the door, Lisbon let go and moved to open it for her, giving the girl a smile and Patrick, as he followed his daughter, a look that was meant to be encouraging. Then the agent closed the door, gesturing for the two of them to sit in the chairs in front of her desk.

Teresa made her way to her own chair behind it, her heartbeat loud in her ears as the quiet of the room pressed in on her.

Lisbon took her seat carefully, and as slowly as she could manage. When she looked up, two pairs of blue eyes were trained on her face. The girl sat calmly, clearly waiting for the older woman to speak; Jane sat still.

Here we go, the agent thought to herself, her mind's voice bordering on shrill. Now we'll find out whether blood's actually thicker than water.

Now that it was upon her, Teresa knew with absolute certainty that _this _was one of those situations she'd used to think of as swallow-me-pleases during her training years – the sort where you're forced to have an intensely uncomfortable and desperately important conversation, like asking to find out whether the murdered man's wife had known that her husband had been gay and in a secret relationship with her twin brother for as long as he'd known her.

It had made her wish for a tunnel through time, which she could enter just before the conversation and come out of right afterwards, with the truth in her hand and no memory of how it had gotten there. Back in the day, Lisbon had come through by imagining to be playing a game against her suspects or informants, pretending that she wasn't attacking the person in front of her with her indiscreet, possibly hurtful questions, but a persona they'd adapted. Teresa suspected that this was how Jane went about his work, as well. The problem was, Patrick and Emma both were people who were personally important to her; she couldn't pretend that what was about to be spoken would not affect them most directly. What was more, she couldn't pretend it wouldn't affect her.

Teresa squared her shoulders and focused her attention on the two people in front of her. "There is one more thing", she plunged right in, addressing the young woman. "It has to do with my consultant, with his story." The agent paused, feeling the familiar calm of a gun fight wrapping itself around her. "Do you know anything about Patrick Jane?"

Emma glanced at ... her father, Teresa told herself resolutely, that's her father she's glancing at. If she herself couldn't even think it, how was the girl supposed to accept it?

"Um", came the answer, "he consults for you, and he knows some magic tricks?" The girl's blue eyes returned to Teresa's face. "That's not what you are talking about", she added, her eyes searching. For the length of a breath, Lisbon felt like she was looking into a mirror, seeing her own eerie calm reflected in the young face in front of her.

And then Emma turned her head and calmly addressed the man next to her. "What's that story she's talking about?"

Guilty relief flooded Lisbon's fingers and toes; the ball wasn't in her court anymore. That also meant that her nerves were back in attendance, and she could feel an uncharacteristic lump in her throat as she turned her eyes to Patrick as well. Teresa forbade herself any considering of circles, closings and conclusions.

Emma's father looked out of character as well: he was regarding the girl sombrely, measuring her, and there was no glitter in him whatsoever. Lisbon watched him watch her, wondering at what he saw there. How much did she look like her mother?

All of a sudden, a short, brilliant smile shot over Jane's face.

"Ah, well", he sighed as if he'd found the answer to a question he'd been asking for years, and sat back in his chair. "I suppose it's the story of how Red John and I ... got acquainted", Patrick answered.

"You see, about twenty years ago, I was making my living a psychic, talking to the dead, reading thoughts, that kind of thing."

Nothing registered on Emma's face, Teresa noted; the girl was watching the man in front of her intently now, still calm, giving nothing away. It was very much Jane's expression, his secret one that he donned only when he thought no one was watching him.

"I worked hard to build up my audience; some thought I overdid it, worked too much, courted their favour without any regard for what was proper. But you see, I had the strongest motivator a man can have: I had a wife and a child, and I wanted them to have everything they could ever dream of."

Teresa couldn't help the fascination she felt at seeing his emotions register on his face as Patrick spoke. She found that she could read him easily, like this. The tender wryness on his face at that "some": his wife, then, had argued against his hours and practice. She felt herself go cold all over again at the thought of where his story was going, even while she couldn't help but notice that he was clearly aiming for his audience – make yourself relatable, show the emotion, let the disaster be real for her, as well. It was what he had going for him, estranged father that he was.

Lisbon closed her ears to his words, then. It was their conversation now, and she didn't need to hear them, she'd grown too close to this man and his sorrow, and Teresa wouldn't be doing him any favours if she cried or commiserated.

Instead, the agent watched Emma's face. On the surface, it didn't seem to change. The calm, attentive expression remained; there was no gasping, no tears, no deeper breaths. Yet, there was a growing tension that became increasingly obvious, and the agent couldn't help but attribute it to an inevitable conclusion bearing down on the girl.

At length, Teresa became conscious of a prolonged silence in the room. Patrick looked exhausted, and very much finished with his story. He was taking care not to be staring at his daughter, but it was obvious to Lisbon that all his attention was focused on her, even while he was studying the wall behind the agent's back. Emma seemed far away, her face frozen in place while she sat stiffly.

Suddenly she jerked to her feet, her chair clunking loudly as it was pushed aside. Three hasty steps took her to the window, where she stood, slim and straight-backed and looking very breakable. Lisbon heard her start to breath louder, and exchanged a quick glance with Patrick, who lifted a shoulder. Wait.

For a strange moment, Teresa felt their worlds align themselves as the girl by the window seemed to become the focal point of her entire life as well as his. This, right here in her office, could be a family, she mused, light-headed again, and the girl was the key to whatever future there was for them.

Emma turned abruptly and started pacing, a few hasty steps to and fro, not quite leaving the window, definitely not coming close to Patrick's chair.

There was colour in her face now, and her eyes were very bright again, focused on nothing. Suddenly she stopped and gripped the back of her chair. Lisbon saw her hands trembling. Emma laughed, then. Helplessly, through gasps for air that made her sound altogether desperate. Teresa was on her feet and moving around her desk before all of it had registered. Reaching out, she smoothed her hands down Emma's shaking arms, feeling the moment when all her strength left the girl's body and half-supporting, half-guiding her onto the chair. A blond curl tickled her nose as Teresa tightened her right arm's hold around Emma, whose head was down. She'd started to cry, and the agent could feel the strength of her sobs where the girl was leaning into her.

The noise of a chair being dragged across the floor broke Lisbon's focus, and then large hands were there, taking a hold. Teresa felt the girl collapse again, forward this time, ending up well in Patricks' arms. Feeling out of place, she disentangled herself and left, throwing a quick look back before she opened the door.

A keen sense of relief pressed at her throat at the view of her one-time consultant's broad back and the curly strands of long blond hair falling across the dark material of his shirt from the head at his right shoulder.

Cho sprouted from thin air to stand right in front of Lisbon, dark eyes intense. "How did she take it?"

Teresa sighed, and gave a shrug. "She's crying, but I guess that's to be expected." With a sense of departing vital information, she added, "Patrick's comforting her now."

Suddenly Grace was there, too. "Patrick? Did you say Patrick?"

"She did say Patrick", Cho confirmed slowly, his gaze changing from intense to scrutinizing. "I take it Jane is no longer consulting."

Feeling colour rising on her face, Teresa went for decorum. "I don't think that's the most important thing right now."

As it turned out, that actually was the most important thing at the moment, at least where her team was concerned. Grace was least successful in hiding her delight, even though Lisbon did her best to impress the fact that there really was no "we" to Patrick and Teresa upon her.

There hadn't even been a kiss yet!

Still, she couldn't deny the fact that her very toes curled up in pleasure at the thought of there maybe very soon being a "we", and kisses, and what might follow those. Between Patrick and Teresa, all of it seemed possible all of a sudden and, incredibly, even plausible.

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><p>Thanks for reading :) Now tell me what you think!<p> 


	13. Epilogue

This is the last one, I think. Thank you for sticking it out :)

Disclaimer: This ain't mine, mostly. Not making any money out of it.

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><p>We're on our way to Patrick's now, Teresa and me. She picked me up after work, fresh from her shopping spree in town. It's obvious, when I get in the car, that she's been to the hairdresser's to get her hair pinned up in a fancy fashion that's quite different from how she normally wears it.<p>

They're going out tonight, I know, Patrick and Teresa, for their anniversary, and I'm house-sitting. I've been telling everyone and their mother all day because I'm gleefully happy over it. It doesn't feel normal, not yet, and maybe it never will; it feels like I'm finally acting out a part I've been craving to play forever, and it's just as much _fun _as I imagined.

She throws me a glance now, and her green eyes are very bright. "Have you decided what you're going to be doing with your night in?" she asks me, intent.

"Oh, I'll probably watch some telly and order Italian", I answer with a poker face, and the corners of her mouth deepen, which is how you know that Teresa Lisbon is almost smiling. She knows how happy I am about this, and I let my smile out, because why not.

"What are you going to do?" I ask her, because I haven't talked to Patrick about this, and I won't, but I still want to know.

"You know what, I don't even know. All Patrick's told me is to dress up." Sometimes I get the impression that she loves to use his first name; she does at every opportunity. Maybe it's because she's spent so many years calling him "Jane". "You know how he is when he's engineering a surprise..."

I smile back at her, because I do know how he gets, and I understand his excitement

Our counsellor is forever encouraging me to embrace my angry feelings towards Patrick, has even gone so far as to push some socket-puppets into my hands in order to act them out, but that only makes me angry at him.

I don't _want_ to be mad at my father, I'd rather concentrate on being thrilled at having one. Also, I don't think it would be fair. How can I be angry at him when it's so obvious how he's beaten himself up over it?

Our counsellor says I'm only being protective, which is something he and I violently disagree on. He doesn't know about that part though, because he doesn't need to.

I've discussed it with Teresa, who keeps shaking her head at me, but I don't think she minds. She has to live with him, after all.

I don't think there's an "only" to my being protective. In my opinion, that's the greatest thing about the whole affair: I get to be protective over someone.

People don't realize it, but being protective and having it be your indisputable right, that's actually something you need family for. I've never had it, and I've never assumed that kind of closeness to another human being. Now that I get to do it, there's no "only" about it, and I won't stop it.

We're chatting about our days when Teresa puts her foot down and accelerates her car to highway-speed. It's a thirty minutes drive from the city out to where my father lives, and we make the trip every week, so there's a routine to it, and it's really comfortable. The small agent I met back in the day has proven to be as reliable in private as she is professionally. Our counsellor is thrilled at how well we get on, my father's girlfriend and me.

In our last session, he even left out the part where he spends ten minutes trying to get me to admit to my angry feelings for my father – the anger and the hurt that, according to him, have to be there somewhere, and the jealousy he thinks I'm bound to feel over another woman in my father's life.

Teresa pulls into the driveway, and the lights flicker on. We're just getting out of the car when suddenly the suburban quiet is broken by the front door crashing close, and the sound of hurried steps on the gravel tells us that someone is quickly moving towards us. I flinched at the loud sound, and now I look at Teresa, who is, after all, a professional. She's turned to face it, right hand at her hip, but she's already relaxing.

"Patrick", she calls in a quiet voice pitched to carry, and things make sense again. "Patrick, what's the matter?"

My father hurries around the corner of the house into my line of sight. He looks out of sorts and very tense, his blond hair sticking up messily and a panicked look in his eyes that makes them seem very blue and bright. I know that look.

"Dad", I say, quietly. It's funny, but I only ever call him that in situations like this. As a rule, I say Patrick.

His eyes snap from Teresa to me, and I can see him starting to breathe deeply again. I walk around the car, not too fast, because we're both spooked easily when it's like this.

"Dad. It's fine." When I stand in front of him, I can see the sweat that's drying on his face. I reach out and take his hand.

"I'm really here", I tell him, very quietly. He doesn't like it when Teresa sees him like this; I guess that's because he scares himself with how it still happens, a year after it was supposed to be over with Red John and murders and lost families.

My father hugs me, tightly, and I hug him back, concentrating on being as real as possible. In the beginning, he used to call me, in the middle of the night, to hear my voice, and I could hear the panic slowly fading from him as I talked him through my day.

Back then, he still lived alone. Technically, he still does, but Teresa stays over so often that she's as good as moved in, and now she's there first, to enforce reality if it happens at night. It's gotten much better; our counselor is tentatively satisfied with this, and he maintains that everything is as to be expected, no need to worry.

It's worse during the day; it's so much easier to put down the flashes and hazy certainties as nightmares when the starry black beckons through the windows instead of a lawn-mowing neighbor.

I know that he makes a point of not sleeping during the day, if he can avoid it, but sometimes it doesn't even take that much, sometimes apparently it's enough for him to look into a mirror for too long. I cannot imagine what it's like for him; the counselor says it's something to do with how he has been living the horror for so long, he can't simply believe that things aren't really as bad as he is used to.

I can hear Teresa move over the gravel behind me. She puts a steady hand on my back, and when I feel my father exhale, I guess she's offering her comfort to him as well. We remain like this for a moment, unlikely family that we are, but when Patrick loosens his grip on me, I lean back.

"Hi", I smile up at him, and an answering smile appears on his face. It's like the sun peeking out from behind a heavy rain cloud; I stand on my toes to kiss his stubbly cheek, giving him another squeeze. "Good to see you."

And then I step away from him and Teresa, to get my things from my car and slip back into being a daughter, just a daughter, home for the weekend, nothing special about it.

Teresa moves into Patrick's embrace, now that Charlie is gone. She can tell he's come back from where he was, because he tightens his arms around her and then his hands start to wander, up her arms to dance across her shoulders and settle around her neck.

It's always this that lets her know the worst is over: when Patrick starts acting his man to her woman again. Teresa takes his cheeks into her hands, noticing the stubble there and realizing that it must have been a bad spell, to have him forget about shaving before leaving the house. Never mind, she tells herself, there's plenty time before our reservations.

"Hello", the small woman murmurs, and asks him to lean down a bit by tugging at his face between her hands. Patrick's swift smile crumples the serious expression on his face; he kisses her hello, and Teresa smiles under his lips.

It scared her, in the beginning, to deal with him after his spell, because she knew that he had no explanation for her at those times, only a wife and a child dead because of him. The agent has approached the counselor the Jane's were seeing over the matter; a comfortable, bulky man who exudes stability and calm by virtue of remaining unmovable in his arm chair, no matter the drama in front of him.

His name is Harrow, and she knows he is excellent because he's the CBI's backup guy on all matters psychological and traumatic. So she's made a point of hanging back for a minute one time when she met Patrick and Charlie at his office, and she asked him how she could help.

"Remember it's to be expected", the counselor answered, measuring her with his gaze. "Don't make a fuss, don't try to talk about it. Everything is fine, considering."

It turns out that those two sentences were exactly what Teresa needed to hear. She knows how not to make a fuss, and now she is able to concentrate on handing the torch of normalcy back to Patrick whenever he drops it.

He reaches for her hand now. "Come on", Patrick tells Teresa. "Let's get Charlie settled in."

He has told her that his daughter's name used to be Tote; now he calls her Charlie, and she answers to that name, has, in fact, had all her documents changed. She is Charlotte Jane now, and it seems to be ok for both of them.

Teresa, who sometimes remembers guiltily how protective she already was even when she first met Emma Jane over a year ago, simply because of the resemblance, has grown to care very much for Patrick's daughter, and to admire her even more.

Charlie is adamant in her refusal to put any blame on Jane, and Teresa is selfishly glad about it, because she doesn't even want to imagine what Patrick would be like if confronted with a revengeful daughter. Even on that day, the one she has come to think of as the beginning of the end, then-Emma was remarkably collected by the time she and Patrick made it out of Teresa's office together. They'd held hands and walked very closely together, a shy light on both their blotched, tear stained faces. Grace had wept, Teresa remembered that very clearly, because she had felt so much like doing the same, holding herself back only with the professional discipline on her emotions she routinely exercises during her office hours.

"So", Charlie had said, when the silence became heavy with their interested stares, a teary laugh in her voice, "all of you have known all along!" That broke the dam, and a flutter of voices and a surge of heartfelt movement followed, carrying Patrick Jane and his daughter over to the bull pen, where they ended up holding court as half the station tramped by to shed a tear and offer their best wishes.

Teresa snapped a picture of the Janes that day, which she has had developed and given to both Patrick and Charlie as a gift. It's still on her phone, and she also carries it around in her wallet, next to the one that has Patrick and herself on it, looking like a couple in love. She looks at them whenever things get hopeless or boring, to remind herself that miracles are possible, apparently.

Patrick leads her through the door to his house and smiles down at her. "Please sit", he says, gesturing in direction of the kitchen where Charlie is moving around. "I'll go get ready."

Lisbon nods and smiles, knowing that he'll be at least half an hour, whereas she only needs to slip on the silky red dress that's quietly waiting in the bag she is holding. Patrick does get slightly formal with her, on occasions, especially after he makes it back from one of his stop-overs on memory lane; she sees it as a hint of how big an adjustment he has to make every time.

Charlie sticks her blond head through the open kitchen door. "Would you like a cup of coffee, Teresa?", she asks

Teresa is suddenly struck by the memory of a slim girl with big eyes in a uniform, offering a tired stranger a cup of free coffee. Tenderness surges up in her, and she knows her smile is disproportionately brilliant, given the mundane question, but then again, the agent reflects, it feels like a circle closing, a circle that has left her with a lot of things she's never seriously dreamt of, which is a gift and a wonder all by itself.

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><p>So, what do you think? Any comments are very much appreciated :)<p> 


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